8 ms·

What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in

What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :) Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication. Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word. "Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem. Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two). Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement. You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form. Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which. It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.

me_me_me 5y ago
> Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which. I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off. One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)
- awillen 5y ago
  "One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically." Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of "skrzyżowanie" :)
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    I said that phonetically the pronunciation doesn't change not that its easy xD Good luck, you will need it :D
jakub_g 5y ago
There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x ... "she would have played" -> "zagrałaby" "would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagrałabyś?" "he would have played" -> "zagrałby" "she has been playing" -> "grała" "she played" -> "zagrała" Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it must be a mindfuck. OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.
- bradrn 5y ago
  It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas: planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak ‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’ Or Wichita: kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks ‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’ These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)
  - xxpor 5y ago
    That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word. The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.
    - 5y ago
biztos 5y ago
I speak German and Hungarian, and I'm trying to learn Thai but between lockdown and my age it's going very slowly. I'm properly fluent in German but I learned it when I was a teenager and studied German literature at university. Hungarian took me a while (as in years) and there are still bits of it I don't get, but I'm fluent-ish for most practical purposes. It's not an Indo-European language and it has agglutinative grammar and it never had orthographic reform, but it's pretty consistent once you get over the hump, it has a lot of loan words and concepts from German and Slavic languages, and it's a very fun kind of weird. Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not. I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language. AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.
- stephenr 5y ago
  > pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension Yeah no kidding. I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”. For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone. The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember. I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster. As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite. I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.
Metacelsus 5y ago
I'm also learning Polish. If you think declensions are fun, just wait until you get to the number system!

me_me_me 5y ago

> Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which. I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off. One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)

awillen 5y ago
"One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically." Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of "skrzyżowanie" :)
- me_me_me 5y ago
  I said that phonetically the pronunciation doesn't change not that its easy xD Good luck, you will need it :D

jakub_g 5y ago

There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6 Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information: (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x ... "she would have played" -> "zagrałaby" "would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagrałabyś?" "he would have played" -> "zagrałby" "she has been playing" -> "grała" "she played" -> "zagrała" Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it must be a mindfuck. OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.

bradrn 5y ago
It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas: planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak ‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’ Or Wichita: kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks ‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’ These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)
- xxpor 5y ago
  That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word. The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.
  - 5y ago

biztos 5y ago

I speak German and Hungarian, and I'm trying to learn Thai but between lockdown and my age it's going very slowly. I'm properly fluent in German but I learned it when I was a teenager and studied German literature at university. Hungarian took me a while (as in years) and there are still bits of it I don't get, but I'm fluent-ish for most practical purposes. It's not an Indo-European language and it has agglutinative grammar and it never had orthographic reform, but it's pretty consistent once you get over the hump, it has a lot of loan words and concepts from German and Slavic languages, and it's a very fun kind of weird. Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not. I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language. AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.

stephenr 5y ago
> pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension Yeah no kidding. I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”. For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone. The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember. I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster. As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite. I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.

Metacelsus 5y ago

I'm also learning Polish. If you think declensions are fun, just wait until you get to the number system!